It should be of surprise to absolutely no one that Between the Buried and Me frontman Tommy Rogers doesn’t like to sit still. While his 2004 solo debut Giles was hardly a serious effort, but 2011’s Pulse (the first under current project Thomas Giles) painted Rogers as a capable and serious musician in his own right across several genres, including progressive rock, industrial, electronic, and folk. Pulse was a portrait of an artist trying different things, but its follow-up Modern Noise was where Rogers truly appeared to find his artistic voice as a more focused and stylistically cohesive record.

Somehow, I’ve become the resident progressive metalcore writer for the blog. It’s funny, because I don’t quite fit the bill of the “usual” fan of the sub-genre; perhaps it’s my background in cheesy power metal and progressive metal that enables me to sift through the chaff that makes up a lot of the sub-genre today. Regardless, there are still gems to be found within the ruins (get it) of the scene today and I’ve written about some of them in the past. Today, I’m here to tell you about another one: Exist Immortal and their latest album, Breathe. It features the basic elements which made Misery Signals great coupled with clean vocals, large synths and pop influences that make us think of Devin Townsend. Together, these two sides of the coin create an often complicated album which nonetheless manages to be catchy and moving.

It’s been almost seven years since Between the Buried and Me and Devin Townsend Project last toured together. At the beginning of 2010, both of these bands hit the road with the ever-so-airy Cynic soon after they had released Traced in Air. Between the Buried and Me themselves had unleashed…

The EP format holds many challenges; it’s often a tempting escape for bands that mistake frequency of publication for quality. However, it also holds great potential for those who know how to wield it. Just like the 140 characters tweet, the shorter format of an EP often leads one to greater creativity, a distillation of force and purpose. When a good band releases an EP it can often give their music that necessary, final push into greatness. So it is with Ebonivory, a band whose sound is so emblematically Australian that you really don’t need me to geo-locate them. More than that, they also have a good album from 2015, The Only Constant. But, a year after it, they’ve released an EP titled Ebonivory II which completely transcends it, providing their music the focus and momentum it needed in order to truly transcend.

In true soap-opera-that-outlived-its-course fashion, we’re replacing the actor who plays the part of Eden with David Wu of Cyborg Octopus! Yeah, he’s been here before, exactly 10 episodes ago!First, we talk about how artists feel about criticism, delve into the creative process a bit, and while we cover some of the same ground we did before, we end up in a different place! Then, we do the news, talking about Oathbearer, An Endless Sporadic, Metallica, Dance Gavin Dance, The Depression Sessions (The Acacia Strain, Thy Art Is Murder, Fit For An Autopsy), Virvum, Ninjaspy and Devin Townsend. Also, check David’s new channel he alluded to last time, RiffShop!

For those who missed our last installment, We post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as no surprise that many of us on staff have pretty eclectic tastes that range far outside of metal and heavy things. We can’t post about all of them at length here, but we can at least let you know what we’re actually listening to. For those that would like to participate as well (and please do) can drop a 3X3 in the comments, which can be made withtapmusic.netthrough your last.fm account, or create it manually with topsters.net. Also, consider these posts open threads to talk about pretty much anything music-related. We love hearing all of your thoughts on this stuff and love being able to nerd out along with all of you.

You didn’t think that, once I discovered the secret of being lazy about these show notes, I’d go back to being not lazy, right? The structure of that sentence was abysmal. But I had a fun time trolling Eden this episode, and so did his new dog (RIP)! We talk about: Oddland, Disillusion, Alcest, ColdWorld, Native Construct, Babymetal, Devin Townsend, Departe, Brain Tentacles, Opeth, Orphaned Land, Infant Annihilator, Betraying the Martyrs, Inanimate Existence, Fountainhead, Anciients, Hannes Grossmann, Leander, Abnormality, Wintersun and Nader Sadek. Then, balls deep on Lamb of Dog! I mean, Lamb of God!

So, June has came and gone. The usual horrors of the world keep coming and going and apparently there has been some sort of political shift in the UK. I wouldn’t know however, solely because I’ve spent the whole month watching music videos in preparation of my monthly round up…

We have (along with the rest of our niche of the community) been singing the praises of Astronoid for quite some time now. If you’ve never run into the name, imagine what would happen if you take a dream and then crash-landed it into a thrash metal concert. The guitars go fast, the drums blast away but the vocals are clean and soar high above the music. In composition as well there is a marked style, a bright, lazy, honey-slow drip that just pulls you right in. It’s like a hot, summer day when you were a child and the hours drew out in the long, dark tea time of the soul (as one Douglas Adams puts it) into a pastiche of nostalgia, fear, hope and dreams.

What goes into such a broth? How does a band like this come to be, seemingly emerging from nowhere to revolutionize what we thought was possible within the somewhat stale confines of thrash? Instead of speculating, hear it from the band themselves! We reached out just after our interview and asked the band our fateful, Anatomy Of question: what made you the musicians that you are today? More specifically, which musicians contributed to how you write, think and perform music? Below you can find styles ranging from progressive pop to Norse metal and much in between. Blast Air in the background and get ready to dive into what makes Astronoid tick.

It’s definitely easy to overlook an album or two in an artist’s discography, but it’s especially easy when you’re talking about Devin Townsend, one of the most prolific and creative figures in modern metal. In less than three decades he’s amassed well over twenty full-length albums and a host of…